Juice

Clemens steroid hearings

The last time Major League Baseball players appeared before Congress, three years ago, a Talk of the Town reporter sitting in the back of the room vowed never to return. The customary congressional self-seriousness, combined with an embarrassing amount of hero worship and token moralizing, was enough to inspire fantasies of another government shutdown. The issue, of course, was steroids, and in the interim, thanks to former Senator George Mitchell’s three-hundred-page report, names have been named. Last week brought Roger Clemens before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to face his accuser and former trainer, Brian McNamee, in a game of perjurers’ chicken that seemed to promise judicial action rather than mere reprimand. And, since saying one thing and then doing another is at the root of the issue, please forgive the lapse in journalistic accountability: a repeat visit.

Clemens’s appearance—a “Roman circus,” according to Christopher Shays (R., Conn.)—was a picture of Washington as usual: there was lobbying (Clemens visited with committee members, posing for pictures and signing autographs) followed by partisan squabbles, with Republicans taking the pitcher’s side and Democrats favoring McNamee. This time, at least, there was also genuine comedy. We learned that the ever-beefy Clemens is not familiar with the word “vegan,” for instance, and that one of the casualties of his alleged drug use was a pair of “designer pants” that he bled through; thereafter, McNamee claimed, Clemens travelled “with those little Band-Aids for his butt.”

Much of the discussion worked its way back to Clemens’s rump. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) questioned Clemens at length about a “palpable mass on his buttocks,” the possible result of a Winstrol injection, and Clemens himself offered this essential defense: “I worked my butt off.”

He seemed at times to mistake the hearing for a referendum on his pitching, and when he was reminded that, the night before a certain controversial barbecue, his team had lost, in extra innings, Clemens replied, “Obviously, there was a no-decision, I would imagine”—meaning that he personally could not have been charged as the losing pitcher.

That barbecue, which took place at the house of the prolific juicer Jose Canseco, brought out the lone poetic moment in McNamee’s otherwise terse testimony: “As I was eating a sandwich next to Mr. Canseco’s pool, by myself, I noticed a young child running towards the pool, and as I looked up there was a woman chasing after the young child, and she was wearing a peach bikini with green in it, with board shorts, and she was a thin, probably mid- to late-thirties, woman.” She was the Clemenses’ nanny, he learned, and her cameo served as a reminder that performance-enhancing drugs are truly a family affair. The Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, it turns out, got his human growth hormone from his father. Clemens testified that it was his late mother who, in 1988, inspired him to begin receiving Vitamin B12 injections in his rear—a practice that was endorsed by Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), who announced that his own mother, while “pre-menopausal,” had taken B12 injections. And, of course, there was Debbie Clemens, Roger’s wife, who was exposed as an H.G.H. user in 2003, when she, too, was a thin, late-thirties woman. The reason? She wanted to look good for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

The Sports Illustrated pictures are still posted on Debbie Clemens’s Web site, along with a personal statement that now offers new meaning. “I had major anxiety!” she says. “I was a 39-year-old mother of 4! Once I realized that this WAS going to be a reality, I decided I had to give it everything I had. My mind was set. I am not a risk taker, but have since learned that with great risk, sometimes comes great reward. The responses from that experience have been wonderful and I feel it was a turning point in my life.” Debbie wore a floral-print blouse to Congress, concealing her now famous six-pack abs.

As it happens, the 2008 swimsuit issue arrived last week, featuring a bikini-clad Michelle Damon, wife of the Yankees outfielder Johnny Damon—whose name has also surfaced (thanks to his ex-wife) in the steroid follies. (He denies using.) In a quote accompanying her photograph, Michelle says, “They kept calling me Stallion because I was muscular and well-built, and the photographer kept smacking me on the butt because she really liked my butt.” It may require a congressional subpoena to determine whether or not she received any injections. ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.